
lass 



Book 



'Ui;si; nt::!) ';y 



,T)2.fe3 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

THE YOUNG MAN 

9k ^ 




r.\ 



< OZORA 3. DAVIS !> 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

THE YOUNG MAN 




An Address delivered in the South Congregational 

Church, New Britain, and before the Lincoln 

Club in Berlin, Conn., February 11, 1906, 



BY 

< ozora 5. D/ivis t» 



Printed and circulated under the auspices of the 
Men's Sunday Club, of the South Church. 



HERALD PUBLISHING COMPANY 
PRINTERS 



V 

.8 



<f«»M>> 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE YOUNG MAN. 

"Now there was a son of Benjamin whose name 
was Kish, and he had a son whose name was Saul, 
a choice young man and a goodly; from his shoulders 
and upward he was higher than any of the people." 

I Samuel 9:1-2 (parts) 

The grave peril which threatens us in our 
admiration of the heroic characters of the Old 
Testament is the tendency that we have to think 
that the living God worked and spoke so uniquely 
through these men that He has never revealed His 
will and purpose through other modern men, 
equally noble and equally the agents of God's will. 

To-day I propose that we turn to another and 
modern Saul the son of Kish, stalwart, tall, goodly 
and chosen, to see what his life and character has 
to inspire and furnish as for our common life. 

I shall speak, therefore, of Abraham 
Lincoln, the young man. My purpose is simply to 
outline the permanent characteristics of the great 
American as they had become fixed, let us say, by 
the time he had reached the age of twenty-six. 
None of his powers was fully developed, for the 
great critical tests had not come; he had become 
neither a national nor a world figure, as he became 
later. The man himself, however, prophetic of 
what was to be in the future, was already outlined. 
This outline we shall consider together now. 



Let me speak a word first of all concerning the 
social group from which the young Lincoln came. 
So much is said concerning the one-room cabin in 
■which he was born, the hard work and poverty that 
accompanied his boyhood, that the notion seems 
to prevail that Lincoln's boyhood surroundings were 
all quite against him. Instead of this, I believe thai- 
there lay in the environment of the boy in Indiana 
and Illinois during those pioneer days the very 
forces which were most helpful and hopeful toward 
the formation of a resolute, self-reliant and ambi- 
tious character. 

We much misunderstand the real conditions in 
which the lower middle class live. There is hard 
work, self-denial, and poverty among them; but it 
is true of this class more then ot- any other in the 
country that ambition and hope and progress mark 
their lives and make them beautiful in spite of their 
limitations. The lowest ranks of society are sodden 
With sin and devoid of hope; the so-called highest 
classes are often debauched with vice and made 
languid from excessive stimulus of pleasure. The 
hope of the future and the glory of our civilization 
lies with the lower middle class whose powers are 
expanding, whose ambitions are tingling with yearn- 
ing and appreciation, and who endure without one 
word of complaint the limitations of their present 
lot because they know that they possess within 
themselves the power to transcend those conditions 
and create a new world for themselves. I do not 
mean that it is more desirable to be born into such 



an environment than it is to inherit the gifts and 
culture which make, for example, a Lowell or 
Emerson; but in general it is to be counted, a 
privilege by any boy or girl that the conditions of 
their early life call for struggle and sacrifice. 
Lincoln's boyhood was full of healthy joy and con- 
fident hope. He never speaks of it as gloomy or 
too hard to be borne. He accepted life as just the 
thing to try the strength of his soul upon, and to 
bring forth the man. Above all things he would 
have scorned receiving pity and compassion for his 
early lot. 

The young men of to-day may be divided into 
two classes; those whose problem is how to succeed 
In spite of the obstacles in their way, and those 
whose problem is how to succeed and be strong in 
spite of the fact that they have no resisting ob- 
stacles to cultivate their moral muscle and en- 
durance. The latter class faces the greater difficulty. 
Lincoln belonged to that sturdy stock of the re- 
solute, ambitious, hopeful poor, whose physical 
vigor is not weakened by luxury or excess, md 
whose movement is upward by tne rough road of 
poverty and much denial to the point where they 
fill the places of the rich whose wealth has been 
the cause of their own destruction. Had he been a 
millionaire's son in New York, young Lincoln 
might have ended as a wit and debauchee. 

The first point which I wish to make emphatic 
concerning Lincoln is the superb quality of his 



idealism. The conditions surrounding him in 

boyhood and young- manhood proved to be the at- 
mosphere in which his ambitions were awakened 
and his ideals born. This young fellow, keeping a 
blaze of shavings burning in the open fire-place so 
that he could have enough light by which to read, 
is one of the noblest examples that history records 
of the ideal mastering a young man until the fire 
burning in the fire-place of the cooper's shop was 
only a faint symbol of the fire burning within his 
own breast. He was in love with something be- 
yond his lot and place. He had not surrendered to 
that pernicious, deadly policy of being content with 
present duty, or even of passing from one duty to 
another as easily and as comfortably as possible. 

He fell in love with learning; he gave himself 
with passion to the cause of freedom; as he once 
gave a sound thrashing to a brute of a man who 
swore in the presence of women in his country store, 
so later he dared to undertake gigantic enterprises 
in the championship of truth against error and of 
freedom against all tyranny that fettered it, because 
of his loyalty to the ideal. 

Thus ever before him burned the pillar of fire 
and of cloud, leading him into the desert marchings 
and forward to cleave unknown dangers, because 
he dared to discover and to follow the ideal. 

Oh, young men, attend to the ideal! The very 
ultimate worth of your being is registered by your 



aspirations and your deepest yearnings. Somewhere 
there is a cause to be championed. You do not. 
need to seek it out; it will come to you. In that 
high hour when the cause that is worthy and the 
work that claims youf service comes to your door, 
you will not be ready unless you have kept fast and 
vigil with the ideal of your own nobler selfhood and 
your own vaster work. 

The pressure of the many duties and the throng- 
ing pleasures of your day tends to crowd to a place 
of neglect the ideal. Be careful. There is one 
great thing to be done; it is to keep personal life 
high and clean and the soul open to God. This 

young man did that, and God wrought through 
him one of the holiest ransoms that the history of 
the human spirit registers. The ideal fire burned: 
the vision led him; he followed the gleam. 

The next large line which I wish to draw in 
this sketch portrays the extraordinary humanity of 
this young man. He was a superb human being; 
considered physically. His royal humanity never is 
displayed, however, until we see the wider range of 
his interests and sympathies and concern. Mankind 
was his business. He shut the doors against no 
appeal of any human want. He was at home at the 
minister's and called his. wife affectionately "Aunt 
Polly." Boys would lug his chain for him by the 
hour when he was a surveyor out of pure love of 
being near him. His famous log, where he sat 
during no. ,11 hours to tell stories, was polished 



8 

•smooth. Every interest, every sorrow, every joy of 
the people was dear to him. You read about Jack 
Armstrong and his wrestling matches, the Clary's 
-Grove gang and their loyalty to him, the school- 
master, the lawyers, the books and the stories, and 
you are aware that here you are in the presence of 
a real world where men and women are the great 
centers of interest. There is small space given to 
conventionalities and fashion; it is a world of 
sincere, hearty human aspiration and activity, and 
Lincoln is the most real and human center of it all. 

Our modern life needs this very assertion of 
human heartiness and interest which Lincoln dis- 
played as a young man. Young men with rich, red 
blood in their veins, who love life and work hard 
and dare sometimes to let the mist cloud their eyes 
when the sorrow of the world smites them as 
well as to laugh heartily when the joy of life sweeps 
over them, such young men are needed to assert 
again the human soul's supreme interest and worth 
above all the conventionality and rashion of an age. 
You are men and nothing of human concern can 
be foreign to you. 

Undoubtedly one of the first impressions that 
ever comes to any one who thinks over the charact- 
eristics of Lincoln, is his sense of humor. The 
secret of his popularity in the early days, before the 
nobler and stronger traits of his heart and mind 
had been disclosed, was his rare gift as the teller of 
stories, and the discoverer of the humorous side of 



9 

common life. Unfortunately too much has been 
said concerning Lincoln's stories, so that he is 
sometimes regarded as a mere genius at the sessions 
of the daily gathering of men at the grocery store, 
rather than the man whose humor was rich and 
fine. There was, without question, in some of his 
stories an element of coarseness so far as their 
material is concerned. The witness of those who 
heard him, however, is that when he told them, lhar 
fact disappeared. His stories were finely told. It 
is, however, concerning the deeper quality of his 
humor that I wish to speak. For this was a saving 
element in his nature. Woe to the man who must 
walk through the world and never see its in- 
congruity, or have his mirth provoked by the humor- 
ous in common life. We need the ability to discover 
the false and absurd proportions in the life around 
us and sometimes too the power to laugh a cause 
out of court when it cannot be convicted. Humor 
when it is true is neither coarse, cruel nor vindictive. 
If ever it descends to these levels it is falsified in its 
deepest reach and becomes spite or cynicism. 

Lincoln presents nobly the figure of a young 
man who had the rare gift, which he had rarely 
cultivated, of discovering the inconsistencies and 
the contradictions of the life about him and then pre- 
senting them with telling force In trie form of 
anecdote or story, and using the keen blade of his 
humor in court or on the stump. 



10 

His example bids us keep our eyes wide open 
to the humorous in common life and to use the 
weapon well when the time comes. 

The more one reads of Lincoln's early life, the 
more striking becomes his passion for clearness. 
It really amounted to a passion with him. He says 
himself that nothing- ever made him so angry as 
not being able to understand what people meant 
by what they said. After hearing the neighbors 
talk in his father's cabin, he would go to bed or 
walk up or down, trying sometimes for hours to 
restate clearly what had been said obscurely and to 
work over the meaning of the talk, which was chiefly 
political, until he had mastered it, and made it 
perfectly plain. The more I study his life and the 
more I think over the characteristics of the present 
day, the more I am convinced that one of our 
chief modern sins is lack of clearness, and that we 
need mightily to-day the clearness of Abraham 
Lincoln. Young people, especially young men, are 
doing too little clear, resolute, thorough thinking. 
We accept the traditional view, and we do the 
customary thing without thinking- out for ourselves 
the reason of our action. Mental, mor.tl and 

spiritual fog lies over large areas of the landscape 
with every one of us. When Abraham Lincoln sook • 
the people knew what he meant. He spoke cle irly 
because he had done his own thinking and had don 
it thoroughly. He did not a< cept opinions or 
forms of expression simply because they bore the 



11 

hall-mark of approval by the politicians of the day. 
Clever repetition of the speech of other men was 
not his task. It is no easy task to think out a 
fundamental truth to its widest implications. Many 
young men are too lazy to think. Like the South 
American chief, "great ideas make them very 
sleepy." We need young men who are resolute 
enough to think life through and come to clear, 
definite conclusions about it. Abraham Lincoln 

did this. 

Again let me sketch in the line of Lincoln's 
rugged, uncompromising honesty. His store in 
the country village was a financial failure. That 

was no fault of his. He had not found his sphere 
of most profitable activity. The failure was caused by 
no sharp or dishonest practice of his. A debt of 
eleven hundred dollars was thrown upon his 
shoulders, 3 burden which seemed to be insur- 
mountable. Under these circumstances it was the 
custom for men to "clear out," in the language of 
the time. Lincoln did not clear out. Going to his 
creditors he told them that if they would let him 
alone he would pay them what he owed as fast 
as he could do it. It took fifteen years for him 
to keep his promise; but he did it. At last every 
note, with the interest at high rates, had been paid 
and he was able to stand up in the face of every 
man knowing that the obligations were met with 
honor. 



12 

It was not easy. Lincoln commonly spoke of 
this as "the national debt." He was not afraid of 
hard work, however, so much as he was afraid of 
dishonor. He did not "clear out'* because he knew 
that it was felly to try that futile way of escaping 
the demands of the moral law. He paid his debts 
because honor is the law of all manly living and he 
was no coward in the presence of hard work. His 
example bids every one of us be true to the demand 
of personal integrity in business, life. 

Another trait of Lincoln which the young man- 
hood of today needs to understand and to imitate, 
is his keen sense of moral wrong, and his terrific 
determination to bear his part in setting it right. 
You are all familiar with the story of his visit to 
the slave-market in New Orleans. 

"In New Orleans for the first time, Lincoln be- 
held the true horrors of human slavery. He saw 
negroes in chains — whipped and scourged. Against 
this inhumanity his sense of right and justice re- 
belled, and his mind and conscience were awakened 
to a realization of what he had often heard and 
read. No doubt, as one of his companions has 
said, 'slavery ran the iron into him then and there." 
One morning in their rambles over the city the 
trio passed a slave auction. A vigorous and come- 
ly mulatto girl was being sold. She underwent 
a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders: 
they pinched her flesh, and made her trot up and 



13 

down the room like a horse, to show how she 
moved and in order, as the auctioneer said, that 
'bidders might satisfy themselves whether the 
article they were offering- to buy was sound or not.' 
The whole thing was so revolting that Lincoln 
moved away from the scene with a deep feeling of 
'unconquerable hate.' Bidding his companions 

follow him, he said: 'Boys let's get away from this.' 
If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, (meaning 
slavery) I'll hit it hard." 

(Miss Tarbell's "Lincoln," Vol. I.) 

Here we strike at the very heart of Lincoln's 
message to the young men of this generation. He 
did not belong to that class of indifferent and blase 
young manhood which looks squarely into the face 
of debauchery and immoral life raid says with a 
snap of the finger, "what concern is this of mine?" 
It has come to pass that the sins and shames of 
life to-day fall without much appeal upon the moral 
sensitiveness of young men. One of the most ap- 
palling facts which we meet is the moral indiffer- 
ence of those who should be responsible for the 
highest life of the city and state. The very persons 
who should be the guardians of the Commonwealth 
blink at the things which make for the common de- 
bauchery and distress. To Abraham Lincoln the 
New Orleans slave market meant a direct challenge 
to him, the young Illinois pioneer. And he an- 
swered it. He answered it as only a young man 
can answer, when he is true to the noblest im- 



14 

pulses of his being-, the thing- which calls for his 
noble and most sacrificial service. If every incident 
were lost from the life of the young store-keeper, 
and this alone preserved, we could sum up the noble- 
ness of his nature, and the genius of his character 
from his resolution made there in the New Orleans 
slave market to "hit that thing hard if he ever had 
the chance." God almighty gave nim the chance 
because He knew He could trust His man. God 
never gives a man a chance when He knows He 
cannot trust the man to do his duty. 

The reason why that tall, mighty man was 
given the privilege of signing the Emancipation Pro- 
clamation was because he did not avert his eyes, 
or skulk from duty when he faced the shame of the 
slave market, and knew that it meant something 
for him to do. 

Give me a few words in conclusion to speak of 
Lincoln's religion. His was one of those elemental 
faiths, so deep, so strong, so simple and so natural 
that it is hard to classify it under any current 
names. Thank God there are some things too big 
too be named and some aspirations too holy to be 
condensed into formulas or packed into statistics. 
Lincoln's religion was one of these. 

You remember those words with which he 
closed his little talk to his friends before he left 
Springfield for Washington to assume the Presidency. 
It is one of the most holy episodes in his history. 



15 

"I now leave, not knowing- when or whether 
ever I may rettfrn, with a task before me greater 
than that which rested upon Washington. Without 
the assistance of that Divine Being- who ever at- 
tended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, 
I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with 
me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for 
good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be 
well. To His care commerding you, as I hope in 
your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an 
affectionate farwell." 

(Miss Tarbell's "Lincoln, Vol.1, p. 410.) 

The people were sobbing as he closed his words. 
Those who were present and stood in the rain 
while he spoke never forgot the scene. 

The politicians sneered outwardly, but the plain 
people were touched to the heart. Here, they said, 
is a man who believed in God and dared to ask the 
prayers of good men and to confess that he pray- 
ed. 

Oh, young men, what about your religion? I 
am not asking just now about certain external 
things, ceremonies, confessions of faith, — but what 
about your religion? Do you b3)ive in God; are you 
relying upon God; do you pray; are you anxious 
that good men should pray for you? 

Here was a man who did these things and 
dared to be genuine enough to declare it among 



16 

those who knew him best, htk townspeople and own 
familiar friends. 

Forget all else about him if necessary, bui 
never forget him, standing among his fellows at 
Springfield, facing an unknown future, and de- 
claring his personal trust in God anct beseeching the 
prayers of men on his behalf. 

There he is noblest of all. 



LB S 72 



